Surrender, Dorothy A Novel [Paperback]

From theNew York Timesbestselling author Meg Wolitzer, a “devastatingly on target” (Elle) novel about a young woman's accidental death and its effect on her family and friends.

For years, Sara Swerdlow was transported by an unfettered sense of immortality. Floating along on loving friendships and the adoration of her mother, Natalie, Sara's notion of death was entirely alien to her existence. But when a summer night's drive out for ice cream ends in tragedy, thirty-year-old Sara— held aloft and shimmering for years —finally lands.

Mining the intricate relationship between love and mourning, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer explores a single, overriding question: who, finally, owns the excruciating loss of this young woman—her mother or her closest friends? Depicting the aftermath of Sara's shocking death with piercing humor and shattering realism,Surrender, Dorothyis the luminously thoughtful, deeply moving exploration of what it is to be a mother and a friend, and, above all, what it takes to heal from unthinkable loss.Chapter 1: Brown-Eyed Girl

What a couple they made, the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man! Not just this particular couple, but all others like them, men and women freed from the netting of sexual love, from the calamities that regularly plagued their more predictably coupled-up friends. They felt sorry for those friends, who always seemed to tangle together in unhappy beds and who fought viciously in the dead of night, the men clattering down flights of stairs, Nikes still unlaced, belts still lolling unbuckled, the women standing at the top in tears, calling out vaguely, Wait!

Sex led to crying; this was a universal truth. There were tears in the beginning, when you were young and frightened by desire, and then there were tears at the point of impact, when you realized you had irrevocably begun a life of sex and all its complications. And much lalÓÎ